Incidentally, you did find something new out in your first trimester, and that is that it is impossible to sing while pregnant.
Unfortunately, you discovered this by collapsing in the middle of the winter concert of your choir.
Interesting programme. You have now added two new singing languages to your repertoire: French and Russian.
French, the conductor spent [...]
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You’ve just finished writing an essay all about the qualities of a good teacher and the kind of teacher you’d like to be so you thought you’d round it all off by listing some of the greatest moments you’ve endured while attempting to teacher others how to teach English as a foreign language.
You probably ought [...]
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Posted in BBC Breakfast, Blogging, Communication, Dr Bernard Lamb, Education, English, Etiquette, Language, Masha Bell, Punctuation, Reading, Spelling, Work, Writing on August 19, 2007 | 4 Comments »
When you were about nine years old you were extracted from the classes that everyone else was attending in order to do extra nature study.
It was one of those half arsed efforts schools make sometimes towards catering for ‘gifted’ children, the quotation marks there being entirely justified as the lesson you were lifted out of on the grounds [...]
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Posted in Alonso, Britain, F1, Fernando Alonso, Formula 1, Formula One, Hamilton, James Allen, Language, Lewis Hamilton, McLaren, Patriotism, Russia, Russian, The Rest of the World, War on August 5, 2007 | 6 Comments »
As a fan of formula one, your years in Russia were a bit frustrating.
It’s true that the races were generally available on one of the terrestrial channels, although it always seemed to take a few races for a deal for the TV rights to be struck. Missing the opening of the season every year and [...]
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“One of the things that was most surprising,” said a British journalist to a filmmaker from the USA last week, “was that your new film contained flashes of irony. We didn’t think the Americans could do irony.”
The British are very proud of their ironic sense of humour. Well, we call it a sense of humour. The Russians [...]
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The name ‘Solnushka’ isn’t one that any self respecting native Russian speaker would choose.
This is because it’s a term of endearment.
Loosely speaking, it means ’sun’.
But in actual fact, it’s closer to ‘cute little sunny wunny oochie coo’.
It is, essentially, the Russian equivalent of calling yourself ’sweet cheeks’. Or ‘honey bun’. Or ’sungglums’. Or something [...]
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Posted in Britain, Communication, Culture, Culture Shock, ESC, Eurovision, Eurovision 2007, Eurovision Song Contest, Flags, Language, Lasha Tumbai, Morality, Music, Patriotism, Russia, TV, The Rest of the World, Ukraine on May 13, 2007 | 12 Comments »
You adore the Eurovision Song Contest and you say this totally without the kind of qualifiers that Brits usually add at this point. Such as ‘it’s so tragiclly kitsch’.
In fact, you are rather bemused by the fact that the British persist in regarding the thing as a monumental joke and yet follow programmes like Pop Idol with [...]
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You can be very boring on the topic of grammar. And punctuation. Particularly commas. The rules are comforting, even if you do treat them as something of an abstract concept when it actually becomes time to apply them.
You are considerably more interested in how we actually use language, though. And the routines we follow and [...]
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It’s the Easter concert term at your choir, and you are having a Mary fest. The lynch-pin of this is Dvorak’s Stabat Mater.
The blurb to your copy of the score says that during the period he was writing it no less than three of his children died. I think this is supposed to lend poignancy to what is, after [...]
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The other thing about spending all your time in a multi-lingual, multi-cultural environment where English is the working language is that you end up avoiding the more extreme idiomatic phrases at your disposal, eschewing slang altogether and generally speaking what you’ve always thought of as International English.
There is a limit, after all, to the number of [...]
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